Improving Academic Presentation Style
Submitted by matt on October 1, 2007 - 8:34pm.
I give a lot of talks, and I've been trying to improve my presentation style, but I'm not sure how to do it in the context of my field. I am in a fairly quantitative science. I have to give presentations where I present results; I am 'selling' the result to the audience, but not in the same way, I think, that one would sell a product, or an idea, or a concept. I'm attempting to convince them that it's right, and that I was diligent in pursuing the result.
One common technique is to simply overwhelm the audience with lots of facts and charts and bullet points. Obviously this is a bad idea -- but on the other hand, if you don't give enough 'serious-looking' plots, you run the risk of being dismissed by members of the audience.
So how do I strike a balance? How do I keep my presentations in the manner of a good narrative, with appropriate display methods, when constrained by an audience that has a certain expectation of a larger number of quantitative figures and numbers?
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Paper!
In his essay about the evils of PowerPoint, Edward Tufte (information visualization extrodonaire) recommends having paper print outs w/ all the data to back up your presentation. You could reference this data a few times during your narration, but not allow the dry data to interfere with your presentation. This way the data-heads in the room will have the information they need to listen and the everyone else will have the story they need to hear. Link: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp